Is This a Limitation of Games, or of Design?
So far, we've analyzed why visual novel emotions are special and how they differ from other media. We've confirmed that the visual novel genre has a structure well-suited for handling emotion. But most real-world visual novels don't use that potential fully. Many provide an experience closer to "walkthrough optimization" than genuine emotion. Why? AI and I dug into the structural problems of existing visual novels. The World of Affection+1 Most visual novels work like this: Choose option A, the character's affection rises by 1. Choose option B, affection stays the same or drops. Cross a threshold and you enter the romance route. Fall short and you get a bad or normal ending. This system is easy to implement. One variable, a few conditionals. Testing is simple. Balancing is intuitive. Low production cost means most visual novels adopt this structure. But this structure has fundamental problems. When I asked AI to "analyze the affection system of existing...